COMMENTARY: Stop the middle class drift!
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By Mikko Lehtonen
Enough already of the growth of the middle class! At this rate we will soon all be middle class people, and that would be a disaster.
If everyone belongs to a certain group, being part of it would lose its distinctive character. Who would boast that he is a primate? Nobody in his right mind would try to impress his neighbour that he owns a nose - except someone who lives next door to a leper colony.
The upper class is not of interest here. It hides behind its walls, and besides, we middle class people do not have many realistic prospects of climbing to the top of the social ladder.
Those in the puny upper class can go on swilling their Dom Perignon, shovelling Beluga caviar into their faces, and posing to their hearts' content in some "better homes" magazine. We grown-ups aren't really envious of that - not really!
What we are interested in is something completely different: the dregs of society - the riffraff - white trash. It is their undertakings that we follow - it is the magazines that tell about them that we read.
If there had been no post-ski-jumping Matti Nykänen*, he would definitely have to have been invented.
Matti used to be a daredevil of the big hill, whom we were able to admire as spectators down below. Now he is a sad Desperate Dan figure who gets no style-points from our panel of judges.
Many have expressed the wish that the red-top press would leave Matti alone. Naturally, the wishes have been expressed in vain. However, the greed of the owners of the late-edition tabloids and the weekly gossip rag Seiska is not the only reason for the fact that the open season on Matti starts on January 1st and ends on December 31st every year.
Naturally, the real reason for the Matti hunt is us, the middle class.
As the tabloids take Matti apart, it is like a double rollover jackpot for us. We can look down our noses at both Matti and the media, and feel so good about ourselves that we can hardly stand the frissons of pleasure.
The middle class needs its caste of losers, so that we would have at least something to differentiate ourselves from.
The Mattis, the Extreme Duudsons**, and those who voted for the True Finns MP and former boxer Tony Halme are our beloved alibis. We may not be perfect, our words and our actions may often be contradictory, we may drink, cheat, skive off work, and neglect our children, but at least we aren't as bad as that white trash.
Their lack of honour, their lack of taste, their vulgarity, and their all-round flunked backwardness are a welcome contrast against which our self-discipline, our good sense, and our humility shine bright golden like a stream of bat's piss in the dark.
They smoke the nation's cigarettes, they drink its beer, stare at TV trash until their eyes hurt, waste their money on the ridiculous products of shopping channels, and squabble endlessly in their scruffy rented two-room apartments.
They are the interesting other side of our boring existence, the freedom that we reject in our lives in order to keep up the appearance of respectability.
Hence please stop them from becoming middle class, because they are our scapegoats, whom we despise, and secretly envy, in order that we might have the stamina to live out our respectable and thoroughly dull middle-class lives.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 22.2.2006
The author is a professor of media culture at Tampere University.
*For those completely oblivious to life in Finland, Nykänen is a former multiple Olympic gold medallist whose drinking habits and bad behaviour have later brought him unflattering notoriety, regular splashy headlines in the tabloids, and a prison sentence for assault.
** A Finnish television phenomenon bearing an unmistakable resemblance to MTV's Jackass
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 28.2.2006 - THIS WEEK |
 COMMENTARY: Stop the middle class drift! |
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